Good Grape Wine Company

Field Notes from a Wine Life – Cover Story Edition

Odds and ends from a life lived through the prism of the wine glass…

The Wine Spectator Affect

When I received my November 15th issue of Wine Spectator on October 11th, featuring a cover shot of Tim Mondavi and an feature article on him and his estate winery Continuum, I captured some online research reference points so I could have a baseline to measure the effect that a flattering Wine Spectator cover story might have on a winery in the digital age.

Using Wine-Searcher,CellarTracker and Google Keywords search data to track various data points, the results, while not directly linked to conclusions, do indicate a small bump in interest as a result of the cover piece.

For example, Wine-Searcher data indicates that the average bottle price, an indicator of supply and demand, rose $2 month over month, from $149 a bottle to $151 a bottle.

In addition, the Wine-Searcher search rank (always a month behind) indicates that Continuum was the 1360th most popular search in September. By Friday, November 11th the Continuum search rank had increased to 471st for the month of October. (See the top 100 searches for October here).

Likewise, interest at CellarTracker increased, as well. The number of bottles in inventory from October 11th to November 11th increased by 177 bottles, likely no small coincidence.

Finally, Google searches increased fivefold from an average of 210 monthly searches to approximately 1000 monthly searches.

What does this all mean? Good question. The truth is, a Wine Spectator cover appears to have moved the needle a bit, and while the easy route is to take a righteous Eeyore approach to mainstream media and its blunted impact in the Aughts, as contrasted to what a Spectator cover feature or glowing words from Parker meant just a decade ago, I believe a more tangible takeaway is to realize that these sorts of cover stories don’t happen in a vacuum and that Wine Spectator cover and feature was likely a result of weeks, months or even years’ worth of effort from a PR professional.

In an attention-deficit, social media-impacted, offline/online hybrid world of information consumption with mobile and tablets proliferating, in order to break through to (and ultimately assist) the consumer, the value of the PR professional, an oft neglected part of the marketing hierarchy, in reaching out and facilitating the telling of a winery’s story seems to be more important than ever.

It’s not about press releases, it’s about people supporting and telling the winery story, repeatedly, as a professional function – that leads to media notice, and that leads to 14 cases of wine being sold and inventoried at CellarTracker in a 30-day period of time. It’s perhaps obvious, but not adhered to.

Wine Labels

To me, a wine bottle is a blank canvas that can either inspire in its creativity or repel in its insipidness. While I have a reasonably conservative approach to the kinds of wine I want to drink relative to technological intervention, I am unabashedly progressive when it comes to the kind of wine labels that appeal to me. In support of my interest with wine packaging, I keep an eye on The Dieline wine blog to see what’s happening in wine label design (another example from The Coolist here) and I also pay attention to the burgeoning field of wine label design contests.

What say you about progressive labels? Like ‘em? Loathe them? I placed a poll to the right.

I will lobby the nominating committee of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences on behalf of anybody who can help me understand how it is that in the span of a week I can see multiple research reports (here and here) on a revived sense of fiscal austerity by consumers yet other reports (here and here) indicate that wine above $20 is the fastest growing segment this year.

These two clearly don’t jive with each other, yet I’m witless to understand why wine is “trading up.” Help!

Comments

For the past two years I have been doing my own research project. I listen to NPR, watch PBS, read the NY Times, the New Yorker, Smithsonian, and other mags.

What do I find?

Evidence that advance PR drives the “news.” I put the word ‘news’ into quotations because the coverage seems message-driven rather than informative, and stories about individual subjects are almost identical from medium to medium.

We tell ourselves that we live in the information age, but that story follows the same trajectory. We don;t live in an information age—we live in a PR age.

Of course, you’re right. And, in the age of information proliferation without fact-checking, inaccuracies tend to proliferate unabated, as well.

I tend to worry more about this in the realm of our politics which seems to be influenced by this moreso than lifestyle information, but it’s certainly cause to take a step back and look at information more judiciously.

I take the extreme view that the proliferation of misinformation will ultimately take our culture down. It will take other cultures down too, the ones that buy into the PR age as seemingly completely as this country is buying into it. The activity is far more important than any information problem that lifestyle situations confront.

Fostering the misinformation society is why we have large masses of people forming groups with the express purpose of voting against their own interests and that are backed by shadow manipulators represented by thinly veiled incompetent politicians.

“...the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences on behalf of anybody who can help me understand how it is..I see multiple research reports (here and here) on a revived sense of fiscal austerity by consumers yet other reports (here and here) indicate that wine above $20 is the fastest growing segment this year.”

At your service:
1) Most articles on cutting back and trading down are referring to consumers in aggregate or the average consumer. Wine consumers tend to be in demographic groups with lower unemployment and higher income. This skew becomes more pronounced as you go up the wine price scale. The 1%? They’re doing fine, and many of them consider $10-20 wine casual plonk.

2) Historical data across numerous countries shows that cultural and taste shifts can and do trump economics when it comes to wine volume and market penetration. If X more consumers have become regular winedrinkers, then it is likely that subset Y% of X are also drinking more expensive wines on occasion.

3) The articles that you cite on increases in $20+ wines are based on scan data. Depending on the citation, scan data is mostly composed of grocery, mass market, drugstore and (sometimes) big box liquor stores. While these channels are responsible for a huge portion of wine sales under $15, as you get above $20 their share of the market falls dramatically. Growth in $20+ scanned sales can be caused by overall growth in the $20+ market; by consumers shifting channels from on-premise, wine/liquor stores, or unscanned chains like Trader Joe’s or Costco; or by factors independent of other $20+ sales such as increased promotion within scanned stores. It is possible for $20+ sales to increase in scan data but decline in other channels, perhaps even overall.

On 11/23, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) wrote:

Jeff,

I respect good PR professionals and believe that the best of them see their jobs as providing useful information, not mis- or dis-information.

That said, your assertion that the Tim Mondavi cover of Wine Spectator “was likely a result of weeks, months or even years’ worth of effort from a PR professional” is not correct. The story was the result of writer James Laube’s 30 years of observation and interaction with Tim and his wines. And the information and conclusions in the piece come from Jim’s own reporting. In my opinion, that gives the story depth and credibility that no PR professional, however good, could provide.

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